What makes Solomon Northrup a painfully effective avatar through which the modern viewer can experience slavery is that, like almost all of us, he was not born into it. A free man of color living in New York, he takes a job as a musician Read More …
Based on Ernest Gordon’s Through the Valley of the Kwai (which also served as a basis for Lean’s The Bridge over the River Kwai), To End All Wars directly engages the spiritual battles faced by Japanese prisoners of war. The film asks–in the most extreme of examples–what forgiveness really means Read More …
Like the Bible itself, Franco Zeffirelli’s epic, ambitious made-for-television Jesus of Nazareth is often experienced in bits and pieces over the years, and is commonly better known in isolated parts than in its lengthy whole. Viewed as a whole, Jesus of Nazareth may or may not be the best Read More …
Set in the early 1970s on the north coast of Scotland, Breaking the Waves nevertheless feels strangely timeless. With its bleak backdrop and its puritanical locals—who attend fire-and-brimstone sermons, of course—it recalls the stark environs of Carl Dreyer’s films. When Bess, a woman of what seems Read More …
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but when offered up within movies, it’s usually piping hot. Such is the case with The Virgin Spring, a quiet film that slowly builds to an explosion of violence. Inspired by a thirteenth-century ballad, director Ingmar Bergman and Read More …
If Jesus were alive on Earth today, and if he had been born in an African slum, what kinds of things would he care about? How would the era and culture shape his ministry? Son of Man seeks to explore these questions. Working with the South Read More …
Two school boys, one a son of a privileged French family, the other a Jew with an assumed name, accidentally separate themselves from their schoolmates in the woods during a spirited game of capture the flag. Julien Quentin experiences the rush of fear as he Read More …
The delicate balance between ministry and madness—explored in other Top 100 films such as Ordet and The Apostle—takes a real life turn in Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, an informative and revealing documentary that explores the life of a struggling evangelist trying to follow and Read More …
Andrei Tarkovsky’s paints The Sacrifice with Ingmar Bergman’s palette. The location, language, actors, and themes are familiar enough to those familiar with Bergman’s work, but something is askew, the way a dream might blend Shame (1968) and The “Faith Trilogy” into a baroque stage play about an ethereal Cold Read More …
